Guillermo Kuitca: Everything—Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980-2008 opens at the Walker this Saturday after presentations at the Miami Art Museum and the Albright-Knox Gallery (it travels to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden this fall). “The greatest artist in the world” Why not start with the superlative to end all superlatives? Ben Lewis, the […]

“The greatest artist in the world”
Why not start with the superlative to end all superlatives? Ben Lewis, the British filmmaker and art critic for Prospect magazine, bestowed that title on Kuitca last January. “Kuitca’s oeuvre is original, impassioned and striking,” he wrote, comparing the artist to Francis Bacon, Lucio Fontana, and Yves Klein (coming this fall!) as successful but little-known figures who at some point “shot up the pecking order.”

Kuitca – First painter in a long while to occupy all 3 galleries, quite alot of very large works more than enough to fill 3 floors of any building save a parking garage. I visited Paul Smelzer (spelling?}formerly cheese at Walker actually held Julie’s job. He helped me be a bit more sympathetic to Kuitca. Some the early paintings reminded me of Michael Hurson’s work. The sparse in /out landscapes and the little furniture the sense of space like living in a space so large you could never fill it. But Paul saw other things the maps the tiny names of places, cities, towns. Kinda like Jasper Johns maps only huge mural sized maps that look like nothing until you are on top of them. Ad Reinhardt used to say art is never good when it’s called poetic and here a poesy appears but it’s so dark so nihilistic like we play out the emptiness of the whole it’s silence. I saw this artist Kuitca in W Magazine I thought at first it was the designer McQueen who had recently killed himself then I realized it was someone else someone I’d hardly heard of was having a solo show @ MoMA but he’s no Alexander McQueen when the criterion is color. The color in Kuitca is very minimal very limited but hey you don’t always get what you want.